Bangalore, February 5 2014: On its first birthday, the Indian Software Products Industry Roundtable (iSPIRT), a think-tank focused on the products ecosystem, finds itself in the happy position of reporting that the domestic market for software products is expected to grow at 14%, almost three times the global growth rate.
A good part of this demand for software products will come from the Small and Medium Enterprises sector as well as from India’s socially significant sectors such as healthcare and education which are struggling to scale up to meet the needs of a growing nation.
iSPIRT has released a study it commissioned for its first anniversary-- the first ‘Product Industry Monitor Report’ -- which focuses on industry demographics, founder profile, talent management and financing aspects of India’s product industry.
Presenting the report, co-author and iSPIRT Fellow Srivardhini K Jha, said India had the potential to build a $ 100 billion software product industry by 2025. . India is currently going through a period of ‘Combinatorial Innovation’, making it possible for small entrepreneurial teams to develop complex business applications quickly.
iSPIRT co-founders Naveen Tiwari, Vishnu Dusad, Bharat Goenka and Sharad Sharma were on hand at the anniversary event where the report was released. The new Software as a Service (SaaS) markets that are being created are very large and amount to a $ 600 billion global opportunity (out of the total $1.2 trillion dollar opportunity for software products), explained Sharas Sharma. For the first time, Indian SaaS product companies are part of this emerging market opportunity from the beginning and some early winners are starting to emerge.Other points from the report:
• Over 50% of software product companies are completely self-­‐funded or ‘bootstrapped’.
• Lot of senior talent from MNCs is starting software product companies – close to 40% of founders come from an MNC.
• Indian software product startups are experiencing ‘talent starvation’ at the entry level.
• 78% of Indian software product startups defy the universal logic of having founders with diverse skills, and instead have homogenous founding partners.
• The three most common product sectors that companies work in are Enterprise, SaaS and Consumer.